Obama!

As the year began, there's no doubt at all that it felt like, from an environmental perspective, the cobwebs had been cleaned out of the White House halls of science. Based on campaign pledges, backed up early on by strong choices for advisor and department positions for anything even tangentially related to climate change, Barack Obama brought the United States back into the climate change fight.

Compared to the Bush administration all signs pointed to night and day differences in approach to climate change. However as euphoria wore off, as focus turned from the first 100 days to the next 1300, though that top-line analysis held strong, delivering on all that hope and expectation became difficult as political realities, both domestically and internationally, overwhelmed slogans.